At 11:00 last night I get a frantic call from my wife.
I work from 5 pm. until 2 a.m. and she is alone in the house at night with three cats. She heard someone walk on the porch and they kept knocking on the door. It freaked her out and she ran to the bedroom and looked out the window to see if it is the police. No car out front. She calls me scared to death.
I only work about 2 miles from my house, so I head home and keep her on the phone to try to calm her.
When I got to the house, it’s was a couple who live a few houses down the street from us. We don’t know them, we have just seen them walking in the neighborhood. They asked me if we own a black short-haired cat, which we do. They told me the cat was mauled by a dog and it’s bleeding from a few small punture wounds and its leg is messed up. They say they have the cat in a carrier in their living room.
My wife and open the front gate of the carrier with a howling cat inside. I swear it looked excatly like our black cat. Same eyes, same bump on the nose, it even sounds like our cat.
We grab the cat carrier and go to the emergency vet clinic. When we get there, we open the top of the carrier and to our amazement, it’s not our cat. It looks just like our cat, only much fatter. We have no idea whose cat it is.
The vet checked her out (she is a female cat, ours is a male) and he is going to dress the wounds, put her on antibiotics and give her some pain pills. We paid $131. I have to pick up the cat at 7 a.m.
We are going to take care of the cat and try to find the owner over the next few days. Hopefully, the owner will pay us back for the vet bill. If not, we did a good deed.
Thank you for taking care just because it needed to be done. I hope the owners pay you, plus bake you cookies for being kind people. The world needs more yous.
If only there were more people like you - I’m sure the little pusscat’s grateful too, I expect she misses her family and will be grateful for a little love while she’s all poorly.
That must have been quite the moment when you realized it wasn’t your cat!
It’s really nice to hear about people who care enough to go bang on your door about what they think is your cat, and for you to foot the bill. I hope everything turns out well for everybody involved.
That sounds like something that would happen to me. I’m presently in the hole for about the same amount of money for emergency vet visits for an orphan kitten with a broken leg that someone shoved into my hands as I was explaining to them that the animal shelter where I was working was closed and that we don’t accept drop-off foundlings in any case. (His leg is fine now, and as soon as he’s neutered, he’ll be adopted out. I’m just a foster mommy in this case. I keep telling myself.)
Nice job. Although you lose a few points for not realizing it wasn’t your cat until after you were at the vet. I kid, I kid!
Hope you find kitty’s owners and she makes a full recovery. Failing that, hope she makes a full recovery and assimilates well into your household–because once you save a cat, it’s awfully hard to let it go.
Thank God for people like you. This happened in a nearby town. My friends live in that neighborhood and say that, besides what the police did, the neighbor was involved in the torture. Sick.
Oh yes, I can attest to this, personally, as I was required to adhere to this particular “claws” myself under very similar circumstances.
One day a big ol’ black cat showed up in our driveway and decided to camp out around our house on a permanent basis. We’d pet him and put food out for him, but were unwilling to let him in the house because we already had a cat, and she was old and declawed and hated other cats.
That is, until he went into hiding for a few days, only to come out from under the bushes with some rather large, nasty, infected wounds on his throat from a fight with some other animal. To the vet he went, after which we had no choice but to bring him in, treat him daily with antibiotics and wash the wounds until they healed, and give him a permanent home.
We didn’t get to keep him very long, as he was diagnosed a few months later with lymphatic cancer and we had to put him to sleep. I still miss that cat sometimes. Rest in peace, Mr. Shadow.
And happy healing to the Mystery Kitty, along with big Kudos to Jplacer and family! You guys did a Very Good Thing.
We had the same thing happen but it took us a week to figure out it was a different cat. Our cat left the same day this one appeared and they look so similar we still can’t see a difference. But the other cats kept hissing at him.
What cinched it for us is when we took him back to the vet to complain about the neutering he’d done. Look - his balls grew back.
I kid, I kid!
I still miss that cat sometimes. Rest in peace, 
